How to Face the Holiday with No Money

Tell your family no-can-do-this-year. Once that's done, you feel better not having waited to tell them. Consider your art supplies. Make things with them. Send those things. Realize how many years the consumer mentality has been ground into you. If you can't volunteer, send holiday greetings to our service members using the USO. Remain mindful of your neighbors for any needs they may have. Be of use as you can. Spend your time remembering past holiday joys.

A Season Has Changed

The trees are in Spring bloom, the robins build nests, Drudge remains merciless, anti-Presidential billboards go up in Atlanta, and we are no less divided than before the election. So much misinformation abounds that it's no less grievous. Makes me wonder if anybody on the right goes straight to the source, whitehouse.gov, for each "writer's embellishment" correction. So much is wrong; the bright spots of economic improvement die quickly ignored; this is such an unprecedented upheaval that the Depression of our parents was only documented in those black-and-white photos in those long lines and shabby clothes looking worse for the available technology. This is worse.

There is only so much news I can take. Yet each next day, I remember our parents who came through the grief: how they coped, how they did their dead-level best for our sakes as we skipped outdoors playfully, the same as we each continue to fare now. The mistakes Obama makes, as judged by our authors of conservative think tanks, our economists leaning right, still by comparison are nothing compared to the previous eight years of incredibly wrong-headed, mammoth undertakings.

Anyone following each day's next events doesn't need me to give examples. I keep in mind that democracy is loud, messy, and that when we began, Congress members actually shot each other on the floor. The wealthy are outraged at helping the poor, calling it socialism. Where is their character?

It gives me peace to know goodness almost always prevails.